


A Fence We Can Climb/Sing Me A Rainbow (Steal Me A Dream)

by RedOrchid



Category: Bandom
Genre: BFFs, Comment Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-12
Updated: 2009-04-12
Packaged: 2017-11-11 00:20:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/472352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedOrchid/pseuds/RedOrchid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Previously called <i>The Tom Waits Comment!fic Series</i>, aka comment!fic set in the Ryan/Keltie breakup, pre-Panic divorce period.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Fence We Can Climb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryan needs a favour from Brendon. A pretty big one.

Ryan calls him two days before Valentine's Day. It's the middle of the afternoon, and Brendon is messing around in the music room, just like on any other day.

“I need your help.”

It's not an altogether uncommon way for Ryan to start a conversation, so Brendon just smiles and keeps tuning his guitar, holding the phone in place with his shoulder.

“What can I do for you?”

“I need you to help me break up with Keltie.”

Brendon's hand stops on the strings. “Very funny, dude.”

On the other end of the line, Ryan goes very, very quiet, and the longer the silence stretches out between them, the more uncomfortable Brendon gets.

“Please tell me you're kidding.”

The silence goes on for another minute or so, and then there's a sigh and a shuffle, like Ryan is climbing into a chair. “I wish I were.”

“Ryan—”

“It's just too much,” Ryan says, and Brendon can hear the tension in his voice. “I keep trying to tell her that it's not going to work, and it just keeps morphing into this _thing_ where we just get more and more tied together. It's like I'm watching my life just slip away from me and I have no fucking idea what to do.”

“And what do you want me to do?” Brendon asks. “Jesus, Ryan, we're not in kindergarten. You can't send _me_ to break up with your girlfriend.”

There is another long silence.

“Yeah,” Ryan says at last. “Yeah, I know. But I just thought—I need a reason for her to leave me. Something I can't take back.”

Brendon doesn't want to ask, but Ryan needs him to, so he does. “Like what?”

“Sleep with me?” Ryan says quietly. “Like, not _actually_ sleep with me, but let her think you did? That you do. That we are—That it's all true.”

Brendon drops the phone.

 _“What?”_ he manages, once he gets it back up to his ear. “Are you high? You can't—Have you lost your fucking _mind?_ ”

“It has to be someone that can't be pushed away,” Ryan says evenly. “Someone she _knows_ I would never give up, no matter what.”

Brendon opens his mouth to protest, to tell Ryan just how fucked up he is to even _think_ of something like this. What comes out of his mouth is different though, like the connection between his brain and lips has been somehow severed. “You'd get crucified.”

“So?” Ryan replies. “What difference does it make, Bren? I mean, people seem willing to believe every kind of shitty thing about me, anyway. Let them be right for once.”

“Except they _wouldn't be,_ ” Brendon says, hearing a slight edge of desperation colour his voice. “And it's not fair, not to anyone. Fuck, Ryan, you can't _do_ this.”

“Please,” Ryan whispers, and Brendon's heart contracts in his chest. “Please, Bren, I don't know what else to do.”

He sounds defeated, broken in a way that Brendon hasn't heard him sound since before the band took off, when they were all trapped in a Las Vegas suburb with family problems, cheating girlfriends, shitty apartments and next to no real chance of ever getting out. It's a voice Brendon had hoped never to hear again in his life, and no matter how wrong Ryan's words sound, the way he says them is _worse,_ and Brendon can't not try to fix it.

“Okay,” he hears himself say, swallowing twice to get rid of the sudden lump in his throat. “I'll do it.”

***

He doesn't look at the message he's typed for more than a split second, pressing _send_ quickly before he has time to change his mind.

_come to cali early. want u back in my bed. not touching u for two weeks is driving me crazy._

And then, for good measure, another one.

_i love you_

He leaves his phone on the bedside table, getting out of his house and jumping into his car without looking back. He drives too fast, speeding down the highway with no real goal in mind. He drives until he runs out of gas and has to stop to get more. There's a map on the wall next to the bathrooms at the truck stop. He's half-way to San Fransisco.

When he finally gets back, it's nearly midnight. He crawls into bed and reaches for his laptop, fiddling with GarageBand and watching half an episode of _Family Guy_ before he gathers enough courage to go online.

The breakup is everywhere. So is the reason for it, Ryan's name splashed across cyberspace, covered in disappointment and flat-out hate. He keeps clicking, waiting for the other shoe to drop, thinking he should really have called his mom and dad to warn them before everything exploded.

There is nothing there.

Well, maybe not nothing. There are theories and pictures. About a thousand new YouTube clips and gleeful questions posted to their blog. But nothing that matters. Nothing they can't deny.

He reads Keltie's blog post exactly once, feeling guilty as hell and wondering what Ryan told her to limit the damage. He leans back against the pillows and pushes the laptop aside, not sure he wants to know.

On the bedside table, his phone buzzes, signalling a new text message. He takes it up and types a quick reply to Shane about some movie they're supposed to see the next day before scrolling through missed calls and texts until he finds one with Ryan's name on it.

_thank you_

He doesn't know how to reply, so he just sends a _< 3_, feeling that the symbol more or less sums up what he wants to say.

The phone buzzes again almost instantly.

_need to get away. u have an extra bed?_

Brendon weighs the question in his head, thinking of pros and cons until he realises that none of the arguments really matter.

_always_

He sends the message and opens a new one, pulling Shane's number from his contact book.

_so what do u know about air mattresses?_


	2. A Fence We Can Climb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spencer/Ryan BFF love. Kind of gen. Or threesome boyfriends with Brendon if you prefer to read it that way.

Spencer has known Ryan Ross since he was five years old, and since the band took off, they’ve been practically living on top of each other 90% of the time. So when Ryan and Keltie break up, Spencer should have seen it coming.

Maybe he did.

Maybe the whole denial thing is just another aspect of life that he and Ryan have perfected together.

Keltie was lovely. A perfect picture of everything Spencer has known Ryan to think he wanted since he discovered that girls existed as some kind of strange, pretty creatures whose hair he really wanted to touch. Ryan has never owned up to it, but Spencer is pretty sure he still keeps the checklist they made when they were twelve and thirteen scotch taped into one of his journals. “The Perfect Girl,” the list was called (or really, lists, because there had been one for each of them), and they had spent hours lying on the grass in Spencer’s back yard, adding important character traits. Some of them had fallen away when they got a little older (Spencer doesn’t consider it to be crucial that his future wife is shorter than 5’2 any longer; growth spurts happened. He’s very happy about that.), but most of them remained.

Blonde  
Cute  
Skinny  
Hot legs  
Cheerleader  
Likes music  
Wears lots of skirts  
Long hair  
Not clingy  
Nice

Those had been in the top ten on Ryan’s list.

In retrospective, Spencer thinks it’s kind of surprising that “nice” even made the list. He doesn’t really think Ryan was honestly expecting to get that one. The girls Ryan knew when he was that age (and that he kept going back to, long after that) were not nice. They were young and insecure and often broken, hiding themselves behind attitude and mind games, and later adding makeup, alcohol and sex to the list.

Ryan would put them on pedestals. Wrap himself up in some kind of dark but shimmering fantasy where they were angels without wings and princesses to be freed from towers. He would idolise them and fall to his knees. Lift them up while somewhere at the back of his mind, there would be a voice telling him to push down instead.

They fell. One by one.

No one is a saint at fifteen.

Keltie had looked like more of the same. Spencer had barely even listened to a word she said when Ryan first brought her over to meet the gang. Spencer had two files for any girl Ryan liked by then: “scene queen” and “cosmo girl.” They came packaged in different colours, had different names for their demons, but really, when it came down to it, they were the same kind of co-dependent, messy jumbled balls of fears and hopes and twisted expectations.

Possibly the scene queens were a bit smarter. At least they knew that they were fucked up as hell.

Keltie was definitely a cosmo girl, which was one of the main reasons why Spencer kept his distance for so long. She was too shiny on the surface. To wrapped up in pink, brainwashing ribbons that told her to always please the world around her. To show affection to win affection. To love in order to be loved. She threw her tantrums and demanded respect just like the girls before her had, but since everything but her mouth screamed something completely different (Love me. Want me. _Need_ me.), Spencer was not surprised that Ryan didn’t pay much attention to it.

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Keltie had been the owner of a whole fucking hardware store.

Still, Spencer had hoped it would work this time, when the months started to turn into years and Ryan smiled more than he had before her. His moods turned lighter, his clothes more comfortable and his hair loose and curly, like he didn’t need to control every single aspect of his life anymore to stop himself from crumbling. Maybe that’s when Spencer had closed his eyes and decided not to look any further; he doesn’t really know when he went from hope to genuine belief.

They went on and off a lot. Even that was easy-going.

The kind of fake easy-going-but-really-falling-apart cosmo girl specialty.

_If I run, will you chase me?_

Ryan did. Spencer just isn’t sure he really cared about actually catching Keltie most of the time.

Also, she usually came back on her own.

It fell down in the end. Spencer doesn’t understand why. Like, he understands every one of the links that make up the chain, but when he puts them together, he still doesn’t get why it wouldn’t just work anyway.

It wasn't like there hadn’t been cheating before. Ryan didn’t even try to hide the fact that he and Keltie had some kind of unspoken don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy whenever the band was out on tour.

Maybe it was the “tell” part that fucked up the agreement.

Because there is just no way in hell that someone as meticulous as Ryan Ross would get caught cheating through something as cheesy as a text message unless he’d deliberately planned it that way.

The thoughts won’t leave him alone, so in the end, Spencer just asks. It’s one night at Brendon’s house, when they’re both getting ready for bed.

“Who was the text from?”

He doesn’t need to be more specific than that for Ryan to get it. It’s definitely one of the perks of having known someone all your life.

“Brendon,” Ryan admits, sitting down on Spencer’s air mattress, waiting for a reaction.

Spencer blinks. “Why?”

“I needed something good,” Ryan says. “Something strong enough. It had to be someone she knew I loved more than her. And someone who loved me enough to do it.”

“You could have asked me.”

It just slips out. Spencer mentally kicks himself.

Ryan reaches out to pull him down on the temporary bed, keeps nudging and wiggling until they’re stretched out on the blue sheets, limbs tangled and breathing perfectly synchronised.

“I wasn’t sure if you would have done it,” Ryan says. “Haley, she’s different. I don’t think she’d leave.”

“She would if I asked her. Not the way you did, but if I really asked, she would.”

“I know,” Ryan says, weaving his fingers with Spencer’s over Spencer’s hip. “That’s what makes her special, I think.”

“Yeah,” Spencer says, turning his head and smiling into Ryan’s hair. “It is.”

They fall asleep like that. Brendon wakes them in the morning, climbing all over them and inserting himself into the middle.

“I told him,” Ryan mumbles sleepily, wrapping his arms tightly around Brendon’s chest and curling up behind him.

“Good,” Brendon replies with a yawn, turning his head to meet Ryan’s mouth for a soft, simple kiss. “Did you tell him you love him too?”

“He didn’t need to,” Spencer says, snuggling into them as well, one leg finding its way between Brendon’s, his foot hooking itself securely around Ryan’s calf. “That part, I already knew.”


End file.
